On November, the 29th, the Bank of Italy hosted a workshop on “Human Capital”, organized by Roberto Torrini.
The works presented in the first session focused on the impact of children’s time allocation between home and school, finding that (i) early schooling, namely pre-kindergarten for 2-years old, increases mothers’ labor market participation while no compromising toddlers’ cognitive skills and (ii) school-aged children, especially those at the bottom of the distribution of cognitive test scores, benefit from spending more time in class.
Sessions 2 dealt with class composition while session 3 discussed the role of teaching. In particular a paper found that higher research incentives have a positive effect on both teaching and research quality: on the one hand it increases college professors’ efforts in research, on the other hand it incentives lower ability researchers to quit the job. Since teaching and research ability are positively correlated, this implies that also bad teachers tend to leave the university.
Finally session 4 studied the relatively low return of tertiary education observed in Italy, focusing on both demand and supply factors. All paper have been discussed by prominent fields expert: Giacomo de Giorgi (University of Geneva and Columbia University), Marco Leonardi (University of Milan), Lorenzo Cappellari (Bocconi University) and Gordon Dahl (University of San Diego).
